CHEYENNE — The Wyoming Legislature has extended what was supposed to be a four-week budget session after the House and Senate failed to agree on state construction spending. The two chambers passed a budget Saturday morning, the last scheduled day of the session, but could not break an impasse on the construction legislation until after 10:00 p.m. that night, at which point was too late to write a new bill, vote on it, sign it and deliver it to Gov. Matt Mead for his approval.
Instead, lawmakers will reconvene later this week to receive any line-item vetoes to the budget from Mead as well as to vote on the construction bill and one on education spending, which could not be finalized before the building measure was complete.
The main budget bill, which funds most state agencies, was passed by roughly two-thirds of lawmakers in the House and Senate after reaching a deal to remove both construction and education cuts from the budget. The idea was that those two topics would then be addressed in separate pieces of legislation.
But the same tensions that prevented a budget deal from being reached before removing those items continued once they were broken out: the Senate wanted to reduce spending far more aggressively than the House, which wanted to rely on interest earnings to cover a large part of the state’s roughly $850 million deficit.
